Chapter XVIII.—On Love, and the Repressing of Our Desires.

“The decorous tendency of our philanthropy,
therefore,” according to Clement, “seeks the common
good;” whether by suffering martyrdom, or by teaching by deed and
word,—the latter being twofold, unwritten and written. This is
love, to love God and our neighbour. “This conducts to the height
which is unutterable.28482848
[See vol. i. p. 18. S.] ‘Love covers a multitude of
sins.28492849Jas. v. 20;
1 Pet. iv. 8. Love beareth all things, suffereth all
things.’285028501 Cor. xiii. 7. Love joins us to God, does all things in
concord. In love, all the chosen of God were perfected. Apart from love,
nothing is well pleasing to God.” “Of its perfection there
is no unfolding,” it is said. “Who is fit to be found in it,
except those whom God counts worthy?” To the point the Apostle
Paul speaks, “If I give my body, and have not love, I am sounding
brass, and a tinkling cymbal.”285128511 Cor. xiii. 1, 3. If it is not from a
disposition determined by gnostic love that I shall testify, he means;
430but if through fear and expected
reward, moving my lips in order to testify to the Lord that I shall
confess the Lord, I am a common man, sounding the Lord’s name, not
knowing Him. “For there is the people that loveth with the lips;
and there is another which gives the body to be burned.” “And
if I give all my goods in alms,” he says, not according to the
principle of loving communication, but on account of recompense, either
from him who has received the benefit, or the Lord who has promised;
“and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,” and
cast away obscuring passions, and be not faithful to the Lord from love,
“I am nothing,” as in comparison of him who testifies as a
Gnostic, and the crowd, and being reckoned nothing better.

“Now all the generations from Adam to this
day are gone. But they who have been perfected in love, through the
grace of God, hold the place of the godly, who shall be manifested at
the visitation of the kingdom of Christ.” Love permits not to sin;
but if it fall into any such case, by reason of the interference of the
adversary, in imitation of David, it will sing: “I will confess
unto the Lord, and it will please Him above a young bullock that has
horns and hoofs. Let the poor see it, and be glad.” For he says,
“Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay to the Lord
thy vows; and call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver
thee, and thou shalt glorify me.”28522852Ps. l. 14, 15. “For the sacrifice
of God is a broken spirit.”28532853Ps. li. 17.

“God,” then, being
good, “is love,” it is said.285428541 John iv. 8, 16. Whose “love
worketh no ill to his neighbour,”28552855Rom. xiii. 10. neither injuring nor
revenging ever, but, in a word, doing good to all according to the
image of God. “Love is,” then, “the fulfilling
of the law;”28562856Rom. xiii. 10. like as Christ, that is the presence of the
Lord who loves us; and our loving teaching of, and discipline according
to Christ. By love, then, the commands not to commit adultery, and not
to covet one’s neighbour’s wife, are fulfilled, [these sins
being] formerly prohibited by fear.

The same work, then, presents a difference,
according as it is done by fear, or accomplished by love, and is
wrought by faith or by knowledge. Rightly, therefore, their rewards are
different. To the Gnostic “are prepared what eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, nor hath entered into the heart of man;” but to him
who has exercised simple faith He testifies a hundredfold in return for
what he has left,—a promise which has turned out to fall within
human comprehension.

Come to this point, I recollect one who called
himself a Gnostic. For, expounding the words, “But I say
unto you, he that looketh on a woman to lust after, hath committed
adultery,”28572857Matt. v. 28. he thought that it was not bare desire that
was condemned; but if through the desire the act that results from
it proceeding beyond the desire is accomplished in it. For dream
employs phantasy and the body. Accordingly, the historians relate the
following decision of Bocchoris the just.28582858 [Or, “the Wise.” See Rawlinson,
Herodotus, ii. p. 317.] A youth, falling in love with
a courtezan, persuades the girl, for a stipulated reward, to come to him
next day. But his desire being unexpectedly satiated, by laying hold of
the girl in a dream, by anticipation, when the object of his love came
according to stipulation, he prohibited her from coming in. But she,
on learning what had taken place, demanded the reward, saying that in
this way she had sated the lover’s desire. They came accordingly
to the judge. He, ordering the youth to hold out the purse containing the
reward in the sun, bade the courtezan take hold of the shadow; facetiously
bidding him pay the image of a reward for the image of an embrace.

Accordingly one dreams, the soul assenting to
the vision. But he dreams waking, who looks so as to lust; not only,
as that Gnostic said, if along with the sight of the woman he imagine
in his mind intercourse, for this is already the act of lust, as lust;
but if one looks on beauty of person (the Word says), and the flesh seem
to him in the way of lust to be fair, looking on carnally and sinfully,
he is judged because he admired. For, on the other hand, he who in chaste
love looks on beauty, thinks not that the flesh is beautiful, but the
spirit, admiring, as I judge, the body as an image, by whose beauty he
transports himself to the Artist, and to the true beauty; exhibiting the
sacred symbol, the bright impress of righteousness to the angels that
wait on the ascension;28592859
i.e., of blessed souls. I mean the unction of acceptance,
the quality of disposition which resides in the soul that is gladdened
by the communication of the Holy Spirit. This glory, which shone forth
on the face of Moses, the people could not look on. Wherefore he took a
veil for the glory, to those who looked carnally. For those, who demand
toll, detain those who bring in any worldly things, who are burdened
with their own passions. But him that is free of all things which are
subject to duty, and is full of knowledge, and of the righteousness of
works, they pass on with their good wishes, blessing the man with his
work. “And his life shall not fall away”—the leaf of
the living tree that is nourished “by the water-courses.”28602860Ps. i. 3. Now
431the righteous
is likened to fruit-bearing trees, and not only to
such as are of the nature28612861 The text here has θυσίαν,
for which φύσιν has been
suggested as probably the true reading. of tall-growing
ones. And in the sacrificial oblations, according to the law,
there were those who looked for blemishes in the sacrifices. They
who are skilled in such matters distinguish propension28622862ὄρεξις
the Stoics define to be a desire
agreeable to reason; ἐπιθυμία,
a desire contrary to reason. (ὄρεξις)
from lust (ἐπιθυμία);
and assign the latter, as being irrational, to pleasures and
licentiousness; and propension, as being a rational movement,
they assign to the necessities of nature.